Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  He didn't want to kill his collaborators for the sake of his own curiosity, though. Or himself. Glancing over at the Iomedaean, Isiem asked, "Can you cure diseases?"

  She nodded silently.

  "Good." Isiem turned to Ena, who had taken up a seat on the barley sacks and was chewing a piece of purloined ham while she watched. "Warn the others not to come in here, please. I'm about to do something very stupid, I suspect."

  "That's always promising." The dwarf stuffed her slice of ham into a pocket and stood up. "Try not to actually do it until I get back. Don't want to be surprised any more than I have to."

  She disappeared amid the warehouse shelves, returning moments later with a satisfied nod. "It's done. I told them not to come back in until I give leave, whatever they hear in here. The three of us will have to handle whatever you're about to unleash."

  "Nothing, I hope." Isiem unlatched the case. Even as he grasped the glass lid to lift it, however, a clatter and rustle from the bone boxes told him that his hopes were for naught.

  "So much for that," Ena said, reaching into her cloak. Spinning on her left foot to face the boxed bones, she pulled out a small, spherical glass bottle that sloshed with liquid. The dwarf did something to it—Isiem couldn't see what—and flung the glass ball at the boxed bones.

  With a crystalline tinkle, it exploded into a cloud of thick, fragrant fog. Bones rattled and scratched against the boxes' wood as if a dozen skeletons were dancing a jig within the mists. The undead were rising.

  The paladin strode forward, her shield raised with one gauntleted hand and her longsword shining radiantly in the other. The fog glowed around her like a sunlit cloud—and then it erupted into a second flurry of motion, this time from the inside out, as dozens of avian skeletons hurtled up in a lace-winged flock. They hurled themselves into the paladin's face, threw their bodies against her shield, bashed against her armored legs. The sheer momentum of the skeletal flock drove the woman stumbling backward. Her red scarf fell away, confirming Isiem's suspicions that she was a half-elf.

  "You were wrong," Ena said, letting a second glass ball tumble back into her cloak. She sidestepped around the chaos, looking for an opening. A pair of hooked knives flashed in her hands, reflecting the blue fire of the paladin's sword. "They're not undead. That fog is holy water, and it isn't doing anything to them."

  "I can see that," Isiem said through gritted teeth.

  The black-boned birds weren't attacking the paladin. She was only an obstacle to them, and they whirled past her like windblown leaves parting around a tree trunk. What they wanted—what drew them and drove them—was in the glass cases at Isiem's feet.

  They swept toward him, sieving the air with their whistling wings. Between the birds' naked ribs, the skeletal kobold hands dangled like stirrups, twitching as they neared the cases and their cargo of dead birds.

  As they drew near their goal, the flock funneled into a tight formation: a vortex of bones spinning toward Isiem. His hood blew back as they approached. Dust stung his eyes, blurring the oncoming skeletons into a single dark cloud.

  He could still see them well enough to kill them, though. Squinting through his tears, Isiem focused on a spell.

  The wizard plucked a tiny crystal cone from a pocket. Holding the cone to his lips as if it were a war horn, Isiem whispered an incantation through the polished stone. As he spoke the last word, he pointed two fingers in a V directed at the flock of winged skeletons and the paladin still caught in their midst.

  The half-elf threw herself to the floor, not a moment too soon. Wintry cold and bitter frost blew from Isiem's crystal, smashing into the skeletal birds. Several of them burst apart immediately, blasted into pieces by the elemental force of the cold. Shards of their bones ricocheted off the walls and embedded themselves in the hanging hams like hellish peppercorns. Others froze and fell to the ground, where their ice-rimed bones shattered on impact. A few flapped away at the edges, slow and lopsided under sudden coats of ice. Ena pounced on the crippled birds, smashing them to the ground with a box lid and stomping them under her boots.

  In seconds, it was over. The paladin picked up a discarded piece of straw-flecked sacking and scooped the last of the struggling skeletons into it, then dropped the whole bundle into one of the empty boxes and put the lid back on. "I don't think these were made to fight," she said, while knotting a rope around the box. Its lid thumped with the captive skeletons' efforts at escape. "They had some other purpose. Do you know what it was?"

  "I have a guess," Isiem said, "but it's only a guess."

  The half-elven woman rubbed her forehead, where a long red scratch disappeared into her dark auburn hair. With the scarf gone, she was a handsome woman, with high cheekbones and a strong square jaw. Not girlish, and perhaps not beautiful in the traditional sense, but possessed of a calm certitude that drew the eye. "I expect you'll want to study them, then." She examined her sword for dirt or damage, found none, and sheathed it. "Can you do so safely?"

  "I should be able to." Isiem plucked a shard of black bone from the side of a ham. He could see no sign that the meat had been contaminated, but he pulled out a small knife and carved out the flesh around the puncture mark anyway. One never knew what taints such creatures carried. "Help me collect the pieces, please."

  It didn't take long to collect the larger bones. The smaller fragments, however, had been scattered across the warehouse by the force of Isiem's icy blast, and spotting them among the piles of spilled grain was tedious work. After the better part of an hour, they still hadn't gathered all the pieces, and Ena began to cast meaningful glances toward the door.

  "We should go," the dwarf said. "It'll be sunrise soon, and someone might come to check on the watchmen. No need to linger looking for bone scraps. We've got enough."

  "I'd like to find them all," Isiem said.

  "Why?" Ena pushed down her hood, rubbing at a nick above her left ear. Short brown stubble covered most of her head, but scars from a long-ago explosion left irregular bald patches across her scalp and eyebrows. "You can't cover up that we were here. The devilers are going to know that anyway. All you'll do is maybe get yourself caught."

  "I won't get caught." Isiem showed her one of the little balls of resin he kept tucked in a pocket. An ivory eyelash was embedded in the gum, its pale arc barely visible. "Not by any ordinary watchman. And if they've got someone capable of breaking through my magic, we'll have trouble whether or not I stay to pick up these bones."

  "What makes the bones so important?" the half-elven paladin asked. "Why risk yourself over them, even if you do have a spell to hide with?" She had wrapped the red scarf around her face again, concealing everything but her eyes, so Isiem could not be sure of her expression.

  He heard no suspicion in her voice, though, only honest curiosity, and so he answered honestly in turn. "I think they're plaguebearers."

  "Plaguebearers?" Ena recoiled. She eyed the toppled boxes nervously, scrubbing a hand against the front of her jerkin as if trying to rid herself of some invisible stain. "When were you planning to warn us?"

  "When we left." Isiem shrugged. "The paladin says she can cure diseases, and I don't think the plague is directed at us, nor do I think the sickness escaped from its bonds. In my estimation, we are in little danger. Nonetheless, I'd rather not risk ordinary Pezzacki if we can avoid it. I've been wrong before."

  "Who's it meant for, then?" Ena asked. "They sent it to us."

  "The strix," said the paladin. Her dark eyes hardened above the scarf. "Birds, not people. Those dead birds in the cases are meant to carry sickness. The winged skeletons were meant to ...disperse them, perhaps?"

  "Something like that," Isiem agreed. "The preserved birds hold the sickness, and the skeletal carriers see that it reaches its intended victims. The cases were not opened, so the plague should be contained. That's my theory, anyway. It's only a theory. I'll need to study them." He waved them toward the door. "In the meantime, I'll try to find the rest of these bone fragments. Don't
wait for me."

  "We'll meet at the usual place when you're ready," Ena said. "Two days?"

  "Two days." Without waiting for Ena and her taller companion to leave the warehouse, Isiem resumed his search for the scattered pieces. A cold draft through the door told him when they had gone.

  Hours later, stiff-backed and bleary-eyed, Isiem looked up to see soft gray light spilling through the warehouse's small, filthy windows. Morning was upon him. His spell of disguise had long since faded, and although he wasn't sure if he'd found all the bone shards in the warehouse, there was no more time to look. He had to go now, or risk being seen and recognized when the sun rose high enough to show his face.

  The boxes were already stacked and waiting by the warehouse doors. Isiem cinched the neck of the sack he'd been filling and dropped it atop the heap. He plucked a few strands from a knot of horsehair in his pocket and let them float to the ground, weaving a short incantation between the falling threads.

  From shadows and sea fog and five scattered hairs, a mottled black horse arose. It stood patiently as Isiem loaded the cases onto the black horse's back, covered them with sacking and fastened the bundle in place with crisscrossed ropes, then took the animal's bridle and led it out to the streets of Pezzack.

  Off in the distance, blurred by fog, the small lantern-lit boats of fishermen pushed out to the cold black sea past the creaking, floating hulks of Docktown. Across the way, a baker's hearth threw a warm orange glow like a lighthouse in the mist. No one else was awake or abroad. Fog swirled over the ruts in the town's dirt roads and slicked the cobblestones of its few paved streets. It enclosed Isiem in a gentle haze, lulling him toward somnolence.

  Until he rounded a corner and found himself abruptly face to face with a child.

  The child was eight, ten, something like that. Boy or girl, he couldn't tell. Wide brown eyes, a smattering of freckles, a dirty wool cap pulled low over protruding ears. A puff of startled breath escaped the child's lips and hung white in the air between them.

  Their gazes locked, and in those huge waif's eyes Isiem saw a fatal flash of recognition.

  His illusory disguise was gone. It was his true face that the child saw. And that face, Isiem knew, was difficult to forget. As filled with colorful eccentrics as Pezzack was, a near-albino Nidalese from the Uskwood still stood out. There was only one such man in this part of Cheliax, and that one was known to be wanted.

  He would be remembered. If the child was a loyalist—as some were, even in this rebellion-rife border town—Isiem could be reported. Then the Hellknights would come, implacable in iron, and the tensions in Pezzack would explode.

  If the child was a spy for one of the other rebel groups, Isiem's position wasn't much better. The Galtan faction, led by a madman named Habar Curl, was always looking for proof that his rivals were insufficiently pure in their dedication to the cause. The slightest whiff of cooperation with Imperial Cheliax was enough to earn a beheading, as far as they were concerned, and tolerating a Nidalese traitor went far beyond that. There was no question that if he caught Isiem's friends, Habar Curl would bend their necks to his blade.

  The safest course, therefore, would be to kill the child. It would be so very easy in the sleeping silence of the town. The mists would hide his bloody work; the sea would swallow its aftermath.

  But Isiem hesitated, and the child spun on his foot—her foot?—and in a swirl of rags and skittering footsteps, vanished into the night.

  Isiem didn't pursue. Swallowing a mixture of relief and fear, he tightened his grip on the black horse's reins and turned down his own path through Pezzack. Once again, quiet closed around him, broken only by the muted clop of the horse's hooves and the clacking of bones inside the boxes it bore.

  It was not a loud sound, but that clacking filled the wizard's ears with echoes. Other places, other bones. Pangolais. Nisroch. Westcrown.

  He had enough of those burdening his conscience already. Deaths filled his memories: friends, enemies, victims of fate and circumstance. Some had been avoidable. Most had not.

  As he turned down the last twisting alley to his temporary refuge, Isiem wondered about tonight's encounter. Was it sparing the child or killing him that was the mistake?

  He didn't know. He couldn't. Such knowledge was not for mortals in this world.

  But there was only one choice that he would not regret. And as he stepped into the quiet darkness of his borrowed home, leaving the budding dawn behind, Isiem knew that he had made it.

  Chapter Two

  The Nightblade

  Two days later, the paladin came to Isiem's door.

  She wore a curly black wig over her real hair, and she'd donned a wicked-looking false scar that twisted her nose to the side, but he recognized her immediately. Her stride was the same, long and loping, and she had made no effort to disguise her height. More obviously, she still carried the sword she'd had in the warehouse, and it still displayed its Iomedaean mark proudly.

  "You're not trying very hard," he observed as he let her in. Out of habit, Isiem glanced up and down the alley before closing the door behind his guest. He saw no one.

  "I don't have to," the paladin replied with a shrug. "Nobody's looking for me. I can't say the same about you." She regarded him with a cocked eyebrow. "You let the child live."

  "Does that surprise you?" Isiem asked, nettled. "I would have thought you'd approve."

  "Did I say I didn't?" She moved into the room, looking around skeptically. There wasn't much to see. Isiem had moved into a small chandlery squeezed between a tannery and a butcher's yard. The candlemaker had been caught up in the conflagration of Second Ashes; whether he'd met his death in the raging fires or at the end of a rebel's knife, no one knew, but when the smoke had finally settled, nothing was left of the man but charred bones. His brother had collected his molds and any other equipment worth salvaging and had offered the building for rent.

  Small, remote, and besieged by the smells and sounds of the stockyard, the shop had languished, unwanted, until Isiem moved in. It had suited his needs perfectly, but it was hardly a welcoming place. A stained wooden table held Isiem's traveling spellbooks, a cheap lamp, and a small collection of arcane equipment. The boxes from the warehouse were stacked along a wall, covered by a canvas sheet. Other than Isiem's spartan cot and the worn, shapeless pillow beside it where Honey slept, there was nothing that marked it as a home.

  The brindle dog had been sleeping on that pillow when the paladin came in. The last year had been hard on Honey. Suddenly, it seemed, she was old. Cold mornings gave her an aching, stiff-hipped walk, she was mostly deaf, and both her eyes had developed the cloudy glow of cataracts. Isiem wasn't surprised that she failed to notice the woman until their guest was already inside. Once she finally did, her only reaction was a startled woof, a glare, and an indignant return to her nap.

  The paladin chuckled softly. "Quite a fearsome guard you've got." She moved away from the dog and pulled at a corner of the canvas, peeking at the boxes underneath. "Did you find out what the birds' bones were for?"

  "I expected to give that information to Ena."

  "She's busy." The half-elven woman dropped the canvas and turned back to Isiem. "It occurs to me that I never introduced myself. My name is Kyril. I serve Iomedae, the Inheritor."

  Isiem inclined his head. "Thank you. I'm—"

  "Isiem, a Nidalese wizard in exile. Born somewhere in the hinterlands, trained in the Dusk Hall of Pangolais, assigned to the Midnight Guard of Westcrown, then sent to Devil's Perch. Where you feigned your own death, abandoned your homeland, and fought to keep the strix from being eradicated by Imperial Cheliax." Kyril's smile was brief and superior. "Ena told me much about you. We've been friends for a long time."

  "It seems you have the advantage."

  "I like to know who I'm dealing with. As much as I can." She shrugged and glanced back at the canvas-draped boxes. "So ...what are they?"

  "More or less what we thought. Magical constructs built to sprea
d disease among the strix. Mindless, but ordered to scatter shreds of those sick dead birds among the strix's suspected hunting and nesting grounds. They were painted black for concealment against the night sky, and their claws were enchanted to amplify the plagues in those corpses."

  "Do you know who made them?"

  Isiem shook his head, frowning. "Not with any real certainty. I believe the skeletons were done by a wizard in Egorian, or one who trained there. One of my early teachers was from that city, and she taught me a similar preparation of preservatives to be used in necromancy. I never found much use for the formulation, though. Some of the materials are too difficult to procure elsewhere. So your wizard, I think, must have trained in Cheliax and had access to the ports and apothecaries of Egorian. The plague birds, by contrast, came from Varisia—but that's only a guess based on the distribution of species, and some of the banding patterns on the blackbirds' wings."

  Kyril stroked a thumb over the radiant sword symbol engraved on her pommel. "Would you be able to find the creator? The necromancer?"

  "Not without more research, and some questioning in the field. Given time, however, I believe I could." He said it neutrally. It was no secret what methods of "questioning" a Nidalese was likely to employ, and he did not expect a paladin to approve.

  "In Egorian?"

  "I've given it some thought."

  She nodded slowly, dark eyes narrowing. "Yes, I can see why. It's a mystery, isn't it? More than that, it's a challenge. And it gets you out of Pezzack, a town that may become decidedly unsafe for you soon."

  Isiem gave her a lopsided little smile. It was true that he was in danger here, but he didn't expect her to care. "You sound like you want me to go."

  "I do," she said, "but not to Egorian."

  "No?"

  "No." Kyril turned the chair away from Isiem's desk and straddled it, pushing her sword out of the way with the unconscious ease of long habit. "I have another task that calls for your expertise. A bigger mystery, a greater challenge. And, if you care, the chance to do a larger good. If not, the chance for considerable wealth. We're willing to pay for your time."